Can Trending News Stories Create Coverage Bias? On the Impact of High Content Churn in Online News Media

Online news media sites are presently the primary sources of news for a large number of users world-wide. The content published by media sites have high temporal churn as they tend to focus on recommending recent / breaking news. Analyzing data from a popular online mass media site nytimes.com as well as a popular online social media site twitter.com, we show that the resulting churn in popular content can lead to temporal coverage biases in the stories that are consumed by a user, based on the time of the day when the user accesses the media sites.